[1980] URBAN COWBOY: The first hour or so of this is a trashterpiece, with the escalating craziness between uber-Texans Bud (New Jersey's own John Travolata) and Sissy (Cleveland's own Debra Winger.) She's flirting, he hits her, they marry, she keeps flirting, he's still hitting her, he wants to ride the bull, she wants to ride the bull, he's threatened by that, she's got issues herself, et cetera. Travolta is good--I can't judge his accent, though--and Winger is phenomenonally unselfconscous as the tomboyish Sissy, caught between idolizing cowboys and wanting to be one herself. She's really the movie's dramatic motor, even if it's Travolta in the starring role. Or at least she's more complicated than Travolta's mix of jealousy, hubris and a dash of aw-shucks style humility. But once they leave each other we linger too long on each of the bad relationships they're using to make each other jealous, and the climatic mechanical bull-riding isn't much of anything drama-wise. See it for Travolta and Winger at the top of their games.

[1980] IRON SWALLOW: This is Lady Snowblood told in the kung fu metaphor, sort of. Chia Ling is maiming old guys, apparently without purpose, but it turns she's taking revenge for the rape of her mother and the murder of her father. The lead villain (Yee Yuen) hires a paid killer to bump off the old men (his old associates) and make it look like Chia did it. Plus his son is secretly Chia's sister and he strongly suspects his father is up to no good. And there's the conflicts that drive this movie. Honestly, this is quite a good little kung fu flick, with a few moments of jarring brutality. (Somebody on the web said it was a Kill Bill movie, but since it has an ear cutting scene maybe Reservoir Dogs is more likley.) But the DVD was terrible--copied off video, badly dubbed (and there's no Hong Kong release I could find), panned and scanned. It's a tight, enjoyable movie but I wish there was a decent version.

[1980] THE ELEPHANT MAN: I've heard this described as either minor Lynch or "normal" Lynch and I guess it's kind of both, because I'm not sure there's a whole lot going on here. It's definitely not weird like a David Lynch movie is supposed to be--oh sure, there's the freaky opening scene with the elephants attacking John Merrick's mom (I think), and the trippy, out-of-nowhere ending with John ascending to the heavens and his mother's voice and image (sort of the similar return to the womb via death to the end of 2001.) Merrick is definitely physically weird, but there doesn't seem to be much weird about him on the inside, besides an overweening commitment to politeness--I kept waiting for him to tell people to stop patronizing him, which never came, and I guess that's the point, that Merrick is as ugly as possible on the outside and as kind as possible on the inside. So is the movie as testament to that immense good natured-ness from a guy who got a shitty deal from the world and chose not to hate it? I don't think it's much more than that. And that's not a put-down or anything, more of a testament to the focused way Lynch told this story. Yeah--it's a simple story about being good-natured in situations where nobody could reasonably be expected to be good-natured, shot beautifully in black and white.

[1980] FOXES: What a sweet little movie. It goes grim at the end--just because you're doing a movie about the end of youth doesn't mean you have to kill off one of your youths--but it's a good enough character study of LA-area youth aimlessness circa 1979. The performances were the nicest part. Jodie Foster before she was ACTING! constantly; she just does what the role calls for, no more and no less--she's the frequently overwhelmed leader of her even more frequently overwhelmed circle of friends. Sally Kellerman is interesting as Foster's mom; she's another aimless character, but she's aged aimlessness. Cherie Currie (a 70s pop star, apparently) is quite good as the wayward member of Foster's circle. I don't have a problem with this.

EDIT: I was amused to see Warrior of the Lost World/Kickboxer auteur David Worth doing the cinematography for this.

[1980] BRONCO BILLY: It's the other Scatman Crothers movie from 1980! It's uneven and weird, but not in an unpleasant way--I read it as an attempt to graft Clint's revisionist Western impulses onto something like a Sturges or a Capra screwball comedy, and then set it in modern times. Clint stars as the lead attraction of a third-rate travelling cowboy show (playing at state fairs and the like, and playing at orphanages and mental institutions for free) who never stops being in character--he wants to be a cowboy and have cowboy ethics and not take any hoo-hah from anybody (even though he's from New Jersey, as it turns out) so he is a cowboy; he is "as he wants to be," as he says at one point. That's sort of the moral of the fable of Bronco Billy, getting to be who you want to be, even though you're broke half the time and your tent burns down and you have to humiliate yourself to get one of your "pardners" out of jail. (The requisite evil sheriff makes Bronco Billy admit that he--the sheriff--is faster than Billy. Horrors!) But the film is marred by Sondra Locke's performance as a frigid New York society gal who finds herself in the company of Billy and his employees. Her introduction as a cruel harpy is so overbroad--think Lilith on "Cheers" but times ten--that it essentially cripples the movie for the first half hour or so. She mellows out as the film goes on, but the damage is done, and it's never quite clear why she ends up falling for Billy. It's an all-around odd movie but it's heart is basically in the right place, equal parts cynical and earnest. (Allegedly one of Eastwood's favorites among the films he directed.)

[1980] MON ONCLE D'AMERIQUE: You know, when respectable film critics hype the heck out of certain directors--like Alain Resnais--you, the film novice, are not quite sure what to expect when you start watching their films. I mean, when I started watching this I was not expecting a clever, whimsical little tale of thwarted relationships and thwarted ambitions. But that's what I got! This is the story of Rene Ragueneau (Gerard Depardieu), a middle management type of working slob; Janine Garnier (a very Cate-Blanchett-meets-Gwyneth-Paltrow Nicole Garcia), a young and single professional; who is the mistress of Jean Le Gall (Roger Pierre), a respectable government minister of some kind (I think.) And their various failures and trials. The first fifteen minutes or so are quick 'n' dirty biographies of each of the leads, done in quick, ironinc flashbacks, reminding me of Wes Anderson, or contemporary Japanese whimsy like Stereo Future or Kamikaze Girls. Plus Resnais is using as another distancing technique voiceovers by and interviews with Henri Laborit, who apparently was a respectable pharmacology researcher (I think his theories are no longer in favor, though.) Laborit's there to a further layer of explanation for the character's foibles, but the effect is mostly comic, like when Resnais quickly cuts from characters trapped in awful situations to rats trapped in electrified cages (or when he has rat-headed actors quickly reenact previous scenes.) AND there's another layer of irony provided by quickly inserting scenes from old black and white movies--so there's about five Greek choruses going on at once. It kind of craps out in the end, but it mostly keeps you moving with the energetic whimsy throughout. (The title--My American Uncle--refers to the three leads mentioning American uncles on occasion, and how these mysterious uncles tried to be better than they actually were, and how they were inspiring, but none of the characters were actually sure if their uncles had succeeded at anything in the new world. So it's America as impossible dream, I guess.)

[1980] GATES OF HEAVEN: ROGER EBERT! BEST MOVIE EVER! I don't think it's quite that good but I guess the Rog is just championing a little-seen film that he thinks everybody should see--and I would agree that this is something you should see. The selling point is that it's a documentary about a pet cemetary but really it's only tangentially about that. It's more like Morris cobbling the stories together of the cemetary owners and the owners of the deceased pets into a 83-minute long meditation on the ever-present human fear of death and how one form this took was this one particular pet cemetary. There's some good subplots, too; the rendering plant manager was hilarious--he's sort of cast as the clear-eyed cynic in the first half of the film, versus the visionary South Dakotan who made it his mission in life to give pets decent burials and not just thrown "in the trash" (as he says a few times.) Later we switch to the second cemetary (the first one goes out of business) where it's a family business and we have two sons who have sort of fallen into the family business without intending to: an older son who's had some failures and had to move back into the cemetary business and is constantly on-camera talking up self-helpish strategies for how to be a successful person, and a younger son who works hard at the business but is a bit laid back and basically just wants to play his guitar when he can. So you have some family dynamics going on in here too. Morris clearly enjoys his subjects--there's very little condescension here, even to the doofy pet owners who are sometimes comic relief (like when this one lady is trying to get her dog to sing to her) and at other times just really desperately hopeful people, trying to honor the way they felt about their animals as best they can. It's quite good and moving stuff. (I do dispute the 1980-ness of this film, though. From what I can tell it was in the can and being shown at festivals pre-1980, but it didn't pick up a distributor until 1980. But if that's what counts for the IMDB, then that is what we shall go with.)

I'M STARTING TO HATE HEARING ABOUT BORAT: How many legit points about American anti-Semitism can a British guy--Sacha Cohen--make about a nation that made an international star out of Sasha Cohen?

[1980] PERMANENT VACATION: This one would be of most interest to the Jarmuschophiles, I think. I am not, but only because I haven't seen much by him, not even Broken Flowers yet--so I'm not in the strongly anti-Jarmusch camp that I understand does exist. It's his first film, shot right after film school, and it's basically this kid (Chris Parker) wandering through New York and getting into muted encounters with various crazies and eccentrics (it's kind of a muted low-budget version of Mike Leigh's Naked, or that's what this reminded me of.) I guess it's the poetry of living life without any plan at all, and being very strongly committed to not having a plan. Yeah. The reviews I read all sort of placed this in terms of the greater context of Jarmusch's work and not as something that necessarily was great on its own. (On it's own it's a very student project-looking extended riff on destitute-by-choice urban living.) So maybe I'll understand this a little better when I get to Stranger Than Paradise in 1984. It's sort of a hard film for me to really love, though.

[1980] DRESSED TO KILL: This was amazing. If you wanted to say this was the best film of the year 1980 I would not think you were nuts. The art gallery scene, the seduction, and then the fact that it all terminates in a venereal disease gag; Angie Dickinson's murder, with all the quick editing and the way Nancy Allen suddenly finally sees the murderer in the mirror; Dennis Franz doing Sipowicz all the way back in 1980; the weird train scene where you can't tell who's chasing who; and the final dream sequence where De Palma gets one last dig in at you. The guy who reviewed this at Slant says Kael called this a comedy and I basically agree. It's a thriller-comedy (like when you talk about a horror-comedy, which are far more common.) The jokes, or the reversals of expectations, are all visual, though, which makes it somewhat difficult to talk about, but you really should see it.

[1980] THE FOG: Like Inferno, this one's big on creating a sense of dread but lower on providing a payoff--like, one corpse falls out of a closet and one Hal Holbrook jumps out of the darkness as far as jump scares go. Apparently all the scary stuff--the ghosts themselves, the muders in the boat, the opening scenes when the fog takes over the town--was added in afterwards after the suits complained the movie wasn't scary enough. And you know what, it still isn't that scary? But it's still a really complete movie--for being a horror picture where the monster is basically a giant fog bank it does very well for itself. I was actually less frightened when the ghost pirates arrived, because then I was on familiar slasher/zombie ground. Apparently the intention here was to do something like Poe or Lovecraft, where there's this primal ancient force that humans can't ever quite escape from, and I don't think it's successful as something like that (Argento is much closer to that sort of ominpresent menace.) But it is successful as a ghost pirate drama. Yeah--if you're looking for thrills you'll be somewhat disappointed, but as an ensemble drama it's really good. And Adrienne Barbeau's Stevie Wayne is one of the more memorable heroes in the Carpenter pantheon, trapped in that lighthouse as she was but still directing the action across the town via the radio, and saving her son as well.

[1980] FAME: It's overstuffed and relentlessly shallow, which kind of makes sense as an approach for a movie about students in a performing arts high school. But that approach is the whole movie--it's all style and exuberance without saying anything particularly interesting about its characters. And they're not even characters--they're just sort of types, the overconfident type and the mousy girl and the misunderstood genius and the repressed gay guy and the hood who wants to dance and on and on. The musical numbers were fun (especially the finale) but in between there's just way too much schlock.

EDIT: But I did enjoy the opening montage of auditions--Parker somehow did them where you didn't feel too bad for any of the kids who didn't get in; there's none of that American Idol-style contempt for the failures. Even some of the kids who apparently blew their interviews (from the way Parker was portraying them) got into the school, so I guess he was trying to say something about the luck factor of success. And it's refreshing to see movie musical numbers that are as far away from Busby Berkley as possible (no choreography, or choreography that's supposed to look relatively spontaneous, no overhead shots or chorus lines or people dancing in unison.) It's still too long and doesn't have enough going on between the ears, though. And when you're doing a cult movie, is it really wise to start serving up snippets of other, better cult movies, as Fame did with The Rocky Horror Picture Show?

1869! CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP: Rutgers!

EDIT: And I do wish they'd stop with the "biggest win in school history" or at least say "biggest win in school history since 1869--the first game in college football history would almost have to be the biggest win. Especially since it was over those jokers at Princeton. HA!

[1980] STARDUST MEMORIES: It's a sweet little metamovie about relationships that apparently pissed off the Woodman's fanbase because he made fun of them throughout. I am not a big Woody Allen fan, so perhaps that's why I quite enjoyed this. The Woddy Allen character in this is a film director who's gone from making comedies to serious movies and his fanbase is constantly stalking him and he's pursuing three relationships at once, between the reliable woman (Marie-Christine Barrault), the crazy woman (Charlotte Rampling), and the unobtainable woman (Jessica Harper--and has anyone else been in a De Palma movie, an Argento, and a Woody Allen?) You know--basic Allen territory. Except he's constantly blurring the lines--he's constantly cutting between the life of Sandy Bates (Woody) and the oeuvre of Sandy Bates, which is either psychoanalytical comedy or Bergman imitation, and of course it's great that Woody gets his own joke. The ending really sold it for me: the lights come up, and the cast of Stardust Memories leave the theater and critique their own performances, and then Allen comes in, lingers, and leaves. It's a nice little "thank you for coming" touch that I don't know why this thing upset people--the fanbase ribbing turns out to be gentle.

[1980] GLORIA: My first Cassavetes! This is allegedly not the one to start with and I probably agree--I enjoyed it but it's pretty slight and flawed by a child performance that's not so much terrible as it is unfathomable--the kid was given gobs of dialogue no six-year-old (or thereabouts) would ever say. I think the idea was to have sort of an aging version of a gun moll character from old noirs (Gena Rowlands) be forced into this situation where she'd have to care for this kid despite having minimal maternal instincts. She's found herself taking care of a kid whose family was killed by the mob and he's got this book with names and bank accounts in it that the mob still wants. And she's tough as nails and they're on the run and if this was a normal movie she'd be a guy and he'd be, like, a woman twenty years younger. But it isn't so the somewhat inexplicable bonding between them occurs at a parent-child level, excepting one bizarre scene where he tries to seduce her. It's definitely a different movie, so if you're in the mood for a familiar story told in an unconventional way here it is.

[1980] HE KNOWS YOU'RE ALONE: Best known as Tom Hanks' first film, though the seeds of greatness were not evident here. It's a competent but fairly generic slasher film--there's this killer who killed a bride years ago and now he's back killing brides and whole bridal parties too. And a detective who couldn't stop him the first time, and a goofy friend who the film sort of suggests may or not be the killer even though they already showed us who the killer was five minutes in. The film tries to be intelligent by being self-referential; it opens in a slasher movie-within-the-movie (which was actually a fairly well done scene), Tom Hanks' character makes a speech about why we love horror pictures and why we love to be scared, there's a ride through a haunted house where the protagonist (Caitlin O'Heaney) can't tell the fiction from the actual killer stalking her. But it's not stylish enough to overcome its predictability (predictability in the sense of its pretty clear which characters are going to die.) Definitely not the great lost slasher classic of the 80s.

[1980] ZIGEUNERWEISEN: This was Seijun Suzuki's first movie after he was blacklisted through the 70s for making incoherent movies; legend has it he couldn't get distribution for this one, and he had to tour with the film, going city to city with an inflatable theater. It ended up winning multiple Japanese Academy Awards. Now, my first Suzuki was Princess Raccoon, which I loved. I'm not quite sure how I feel about this one, though. It's definitely got something to do with the supernatural, but it's definitely not out to scare you, and the supernatural elements only become obvious in about the last 15 minutes. The rest of the time its a tale of multiple love triangles between a calm, Westernized professor (Toshiya Fujita--and "Westernized" is important--this is set in the Taisho period (and is part of the Taisho Trilogy with Kagero-Za and Yumeji) which was after 1912 and before 1926), his wife (Michiyo Ookusu), a crazy traditionalist professor (Yoshio Harada) who may or may not have killed a woman, his wife and a geisha (both played by Naoko Otani, but it's sort of an odd dual role as she plays them both pretty similarly.) And that's your narrative, just bouncing these characters off each other. But there's weird touches (besides Suzuki's usual weird touches) to let you know something else is going on here. Nakasano (Harada) is obsessed with bones--he fantasizes about them when he first meets Otani's geisha. He's turned on by Shuko (Ookusu) when she's sick with a rash. She, on the other hand, finds rotten fruit delicious and--in one jarring scene--actually licks his eyeball. It's stuff like this, and a general sense of pleasure in decay and amorality, that makes more sense in light of the supernatural stuff at the ending. Basically (HA!) the world of the dead is bleeding over into the world of the living and once you get that twist at the end your understanding of the movie (which could just as easily be seen as a lot of interesting confusion) starts to change. So I'm definitely going to need to watch this again; the reviews have pointed out that it is a challenging film, and I agree. But it is Suzuki and I don't think he messes with you just to mess with you, and further viewings should be rewarding (they were with Princess Raccoon.)

[1980] INFERNO: Those Argento/De Palma comparisons are really apt, I think--both love playing around with your expectations much more than giving you what you think you want. Inferno, for instance, put me in a sense of constant dread throughout, but most of the payoffs were pretty tame--a lady gets attacked by cats, a corpse slowly floats into view, death personified turns out to be a skeleton in a hood. But maybe anything would be tame compared to the buildup Argento was giving all these scenes. He sort of throws every part of the screen vocabulary that means "something bad is about to happen" at you--cameras that follow their victims, actors on one side of the frame and you just know something bad is going to pop into the other side (though it doesn't), voices in the background, quick cuts to random violence, corners that the actors can see around but we can't. And then somebody does get attacked or Leigh McCloskey finds Mater Tenebrarum's secret chamber and Argento tells Keith Emerson to crank up the synthesizers as if to say, "Relax, kids! Just messing with you. The scary part is over now." Until the next scary part--and this movie is all scary parts where it isn't slow-developing murder scenes. Some reviewers have noted that Inferno is sort of a filmed nightmare and I agree with that; the characters are compelled to swim into underground chambers and pull up floorboards and travel down into What Lies Beneath in a way that reminded me of that sort of passive action that happens during a dream. And it's a nightmare because of all the dread, obviously, and because McCloskey's character basically gets to wake up in the end and escape the nightmare. He's so wooden in this that it has to be intentional--he's dream-acting! (Irene Miracle plays his sister--if there was a Special Acheivement Oscar for Best Underwater Performance she'd have one.) So yeah--if you're the kind of person who can't enjoy a horror film because the characters make dumb decisions this is definitely not the film for you. But if you can accept the characters as basically actors in a dream--or don't need a ton of blood and guts to get your thrills--you may enjoy this quite a bit.

[1980] THE LEGEND OF TIANYUN MOUNTAIN: My first foray into mainland China for this project! This one was on the Asia Weekly 100 greatest Chinese films list; directed by Xie Jin, it seems to be one of the earliest "scar" movies, which addressed/criticized/exposed the horrors, excesses and atrocities of the Cultural Revolution. The direction is very much of the "realist" style: minimal orchestration, quiet, understated performances, nobody getting shot or jumping out of buildings or anything. It's a thwarted love story: two women fall for the same guy, but once he gets sent out to the boonies for being a bourgeois intellectual only one of them sticks with them, and she's portrayed as more sad-sackish (she wears glasses--wasn't that always a mark of the intellectual in communist propaganda?) The other is a gung-ho party type who can't take life in the hinterlands so she marries a party member back in the city and moves on from there. Of course, years later her ex's file comes up for review in her office and she has a whole lot of guilt to work out, because she's the one living the comfortable life while her ex and her old friend sweat it out on the farm. It's not as terribly propagandish as you would think a film of this era would be, and mostly works out to be a quiet drama of missed opportunities and eroded idealism. Check it out just to see what a good pre-Zhang Yimou/Chen Kaige People's Republic film looks like--the VCD is both cheap and pretty decent looking.

[1980] QURBANI: And then comes Qurbani to restore my faith in Bollywood. Directed and starring Feroz Khan (who looks and dresses oddly like Johnny Cash throughout) it's completely overstuffed and never lets up--for two and a half hours it keeps coming, chucking violence and songs and Zeenat Aman in a bikini at you. It's allegedly based around a love triangle between Aman, Khan and Vinod Khanna's character, but once Khan's established that yes, Zeenat loves them both, or something, we move on to some meaty male bonding and Khanna's sacrifice to save girlfriend, daughter and best friend--but it's Khan running toward him in slow motion as he dies. And I love the endlessly repeated James Bond-meets-Morricone sountrack. Definitely worth checking out.

[1980] RED ROSE: OK--still trying to figure out this whole Bollywood thing. I found a few guides (here, here and here), and while I'm not convinced it's completely worth it (all the Indian cinemas seem really insular to me, without a lot to offer outsiders) I'm committed to watching at least a little Hindi cinema. Which leads me to Red Rose, which is sort of a thriller about a naive shopgirl (Poonam Dhillon) marrying a guy who has a real need to kill women. If you can get past the usual patient Bollywood pace it's actually a pretty good piece of trash. Your deranged killer (Rajesh Khanna--apparently a huge star in the 70s, and taking a huge risk playing an antihero here) has been raised to be his father's instrument of revenge for his wife's infidelities--he lures girls back to his mansion, records himself sleeping with and then killing them, and then passes the film along to his father to watch. And then he buries them underneath a single red rose and we have our title. Of course, he actually falls for his latest victim, which puts him a strange place psychologically, and the rest of the film is consumed with his breakdown. Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" makes a memorable appearance as the background music for a murder in a disco.

[1980] THE YOUNG MASTER: Jackie Chan's directorial debut! The plot is rudimentary, and actually distracting at times, since it's about Jackie's harsh master throwing him out after he loses a dragon puppet race. So it's sort of jarring when we forget all about that for awhile and go right into Jackie's comedy stuff. There's a chair fight with Yuen Biao that's pretty good, and a much better fight with Lily Li where she uses her skirt as a weapon--something Jackie himself repeats later when he's taking out a couple of toughs. I thought the final fight againt Whang In-Sik was on the verge of going too long (it felt like at least 15 minutes) because Jackie was taking a beating--that's what he does--and of course he's going to come back and win (he hulks up at one point and becomes nigh invulnerable) but it's such an enjoyable fight I ended up not caring about the length (or the hulking up.) It's quite a brutal fight, by the way; it's not overchoreographed, and Chan pumped up the audio on the slaps and on his own ragged breathing during the part of the fight he was getting his butt kicked. Not a complete film by any means, but the fights that I mentioned are fantastic.

[1980] RESURRECTION: Yes, Burstyn is great in this, but the direction is really static and I can't tell you how many times I noticed the lack of anything other than ambient noise and dialogue on the soundtrack. Flat direction doesn't add anything to a stoy about a woman who has a near-death experience and comes back with the ability to heal people--and the direction really should add something to that kind of story, and not be as barebones as possible. There's some nice scenes of Burstyn healing people and temporarily taking on their maladies as she does, but really, a movie about the supernatural should at least be semi-mysterious. It's worth watching for Burstyn but don't go crazy tracking down a copy (it's never been on DVD--I got my bootleg here.)

[1980] ALTERED STATES: My only problem with this one is that the love story part never quite matches the phantasmagorical imagery part--shouldn't the love for Blair Brown that brings William Hurt back from the brink of madness/devolution/evolution/whatever be stated a little more clearly? It's one of those situations where you would like the movie to show you why these two like each other, instead of just having the characters announce their love sometimes. It needed more sentiment, but I don't think Ken Russell does sentiment. But in terms of mood, and imagery, and crazy over-the-top soundtracks, this thing is one of a kind. Not that the imagery exactly makes sense in terms of the story--like, if he's regressing, shouldn't Dante's Inferno come before the crucifixion and not after? But the imagery itself, though....for some reason Tron comes up a lot in reviews of Altered States, and I guess (besides the 80s connection) both are flawed movies with absolutely unique sets of visuals. Like the amoebaman, or Hurt banging into the walls trying to put the amoebaman back in his place in the evolutionary sequence. Or the multi-eyed goat. Or when the lizard becomes his wife and then they both get eroded away in the sands of time. Even the ape man wasn't that bad, though it's the one stretch of the movie that gets a little mundane. Yeah--aside from the cheapness of the romance that's supposed to be holding everything together this is a bunch of good stuff.

[1980] WE'RE GOING TO EAT YOU: What a delirious piece of filmmaking (to sound like a film critic for a minute here.) This one definitely gets by on energy more than anything else. There's some kind of plot in there about Agent 999 (Norman Chu--the bad guy in The Sword) following the trail of the bandit Rolex to a tiny, out-of-the-way village populated by cannibals, but that's just Tsui's excuse to show as much gore as he could get away with (which isn't a whole lot relative to an Italian cannibal movie.) And to put Agent 999 in as many crazy situations as possible, which he has to fight his way out of (and Corey Yuen I believe was the action director.) And a giant transvestite and tons of slapstick. Genre-wise it's all over the place but tonally it's consistent--it's "how many ways can we tell tasteless, bloody jokes for 90 minutes?" So it is, of course, completely worth your time.

[1980] THE SPOOKY BUNCH: I think I'm going to enjoy going through the Hong Kong New Wave, if this and The Sword are any indication of what's to come. OK--this is about a Cantonese opera troupe that finds itself beseiged by ghosts. It turns out the ancestors of one of the troupe members (Josephine Siao) and the relative of another member (Kenny Bee) sold some bad medicine to an army platoon, which killed them all, and now they're out for revenge. Comical, inept revenge. It's not out to scare you, but it's not a pure comedy either--it's sort of a precursor for the comic/supernatural pictures Hong Kong would put out in the 80s. It's also a catalog of Chinese superstitions, many new to me--did you know if a woman jumps over you you stop growing? Or that if you're in an opera troupe it's bad luck to speak backstage before the show begins? Another interesting point (also true in Spooky Encounters) is that when the supernatural happens, nobody's shocked--they just sort of accept it and move on. I'm not as high on this one as I was on The Sword, but it's a more subdued picture in terms of action (there's hardly any) while being much quirkier in terms of character. I think I'll like it better with a few more viewings.

[1980] DEATH WATCH: Harvey Keitel? Harry Dean Stanton? Max von Sydow? Oh yeah--we're in deep cult movie with this one, directed by Bernard Tavernier. It's the near future and Romy Schneider has been given two months to live. Stanton is the producer who's trying to convince her to let him televise her death. Keitel has had cameras installed in his eyes so that he can follow her everywhere, since she's rambunctious and insists on dying off-camera. It's not without its charm but I found it hard to follow (it's in English but half the actors speak it as a second language.) Supposedly there's another version of this that explains that Katherine (Schneider's character) has been lied to, and isn't actually dying, and the plan is to rescue her later on in the series, but this is certainly not explicit on my ancient laserdisc. On my ancient laserdisc it's just an interesting kind of confusing.

[1980] HEAVEN'S GATE: I can't pretend I didn't enjoy this--so I won't. Yes--it's too long, and rambling, and doesn't represent the actual Johnson County War in the slightest, but all the bloat and historical inaccuracy were extremely well done, and the last battle scene is really memorable. (Oppressed immigrants mount a last charge on the evil hired guns behind huge log walls mounted on wagons. It's incredibly brutal--Cimino spikes the sound on a couple of people's death cries, so you can actually feel the bullets hitting.) It sets up its internal world extremely well, a world of rigid class heirarchy where no matter what a poor immigrant does life is a miserable struggle and any attempt at rebellion will be ruthlessly stamped out by those with money, and power, who will always have money and power. Kris Kristofferson's character is symbolic of Cimino's intentions: his character starts off graduating from Harvard; we find him next as a lawman in Wyoming with a relationship with the local hooker with a heart of gold (Isabelle Huppert--she's great but obviously the role is a cliche, so you can pick on Cimino for that) that he can't ever commit to, even though the affection between them is genuine. Why? Rigid class roles! And of course Isabelle is killed in the end by another member of the upper class, and Kristofferson goes back to his gilded life, having changed absolutely nothing out in the great frontier. So, yeah, the movie is unceasingly depressing, and hardly anyone makes it out of it alive or happy. But in a good way somehow! I dunno. Just keep in mind that this movie is just as mythic and unreal in its treatment of how the west was won as any other Western and you may enjoy yourself. Of course the myth here is that the American dream will always be crushed by American power, which may explain part of the reason why it bombed (the other part: the legendarily bad buzz) and why the French were the first to revive it critically.

[1980] THE VICTIM: Another Sammo Hung movie! It's not as good as the unapologetically fun Spooky Encounters, but the straight-up martial arts action is better. Hung burdened this one with a lot more plot--he inserted himself for comic relief purposes into a battle between two brothers, played by Leung Kar Lan and Chang Yi, who are nursing a lifelong grudge against each other. (The battle between two brothers idea would repeat itself in Spooky Encounters, but in that film Hung remembered to make himself the focus of the film. In The Victim the brothers' quarrel is definitely the main story.) Sammo's trying to get himself apprenticed to Leung Kar Lan, you see, and he won't take no for an answer (and both takes and gives an impressive number of beatings in the process.) It's worth watching for the fights but I can't recommend it too too much as it doesn't resolve the various plot points that well, and frequently can't decide whether to break out the sentiment or ignore the sentiment. Luckily Sammo figured out how to do everything right later this same year, so we can chalk this up to a learning experience (and not a bad one.)

[1980] USED CARS: Well--as far as bloated comedies from the year 1980 go, it's not as good as Blues Brothers, but it's okay. Jack Warden is great in a dual role as a nice and amoral used car lot owner and a mean and amoral used car lot owner. Kurt Russell is Kurt Russell. I get the idea from a bit of Googling that Zemeckis and Gale intended this to be sort of a Capra movie where everyone was completely hateful. But nobody who matters (Russell, his girlfriend, his sidekick) is quite hateful enough to stop being likeable. And Capra didn't need to keep blowing cars up to keep people watching. I'm just going to quote from a review I found at IMDB, because I agree with it: "The situations are funny enough, and the writing is passable, but there's a sense to almost every scene that the gags are being overplayed. Zemeckis seems to have pushed the actors to be zanier, and louder, and more profane, when a more low-key approach might have served them better. The situations are outlandish enough that it's not really necessary to sell them much. Zemeckis's approach, however, is to sell everything harder, like he's hawking some old beater instead of a serviceable machine."

See also this Movie Martyr review. Bill Chambers liked it, as did (apparently) Pauline Kael, so I could be full of it.

[1980] THE BIG RED ONE: AKA Sam Fuller Hearts Lee Marvin. Aesthetically it's a bit dated--people just fall down and die when they're shot instead of screaming and flailing as in modern war porn, and they do that thing where speaking English in an accent stands in for a foreign language (instead of subtitles.) Tonally it's all over the map, but it seems to love absurdity more than anything else--the asylum scene with an assassin among the inmates, the woman giving birth in the tank, Robert Carradine pulling a cigar out of a dead man's pocket and not even pausing to look at the intestines spilling out of his gut. A Belgian lady who can spot a German infiltrator by the way he eats. Lee Marvin throws away a wounded man's testicle, but the guy's deliriously happy because he still has his cock. An unconscious Marvin getting mouth-kissed by a German who thinks Lee's a "superman." There's great moments of dialogue too: the "Horst Wessel was a pimp" speech, the "fat ass against a cold window" fantasy of Kaiser's. Performances--here we range from Lee Marvin being completely awesome as the best possible Sgt Rock to Robert Carradine ruining a movie with narration in a way that probably tops Harrison Ford in Blade Runner. (And yes--neither Fuller nor Ridley Scott wanted the narration. And I can't believe I've watched two Robert Carradine movies in a row.) Mark Hamill's performance lies somewhere in the middle. The film's kind of a muddle and I understand that was probably Fuller's intent, to present war as a series of absurdities and grotesqueries (did I mention the ear cutting?) that you simply either survive or do not survive--there's almost no trace of war as something heroic here. It's good at what it does but it's not whole enough somehow for me to really love it. It's like once Fuller decided to make a war film drained of heroism he couldn't quite figure out what to replace it with, and stuffed in as much stuff as he could think of--so as a cinematic grab-bag it's great.

[1980] THE LONG RIDERS: This was Walter Hill's followup to The Warriors and it's not as great as that but it's good. The gimmick casting involved casting some Carradines as the Younger brothers and the Keach brothers as the James brothers. (There's some Quaids in there too.) I think this was Walter's love letter to Peckinpah, at least in the action sequences--they're slo-mo and there's closeups of people shooting and bodies slowly falling to the ground. Plotwise it's nowhere near as nihilistic as a Peckinpah, as Hill is interested in exploring the family tensions angle of the end of the James-Younger gang. Jesse (James Keach) is more or less a supporting character in this thing--the real meaty stuff is given to David Carradine as Cole Younger. I hate thinking I have to like him now just because he was great in Kill Bill (he's definitely the most talented Carradine of his generation--Keith and Robert are kind of useless in this,) but he's good in this too as the leader of the Younger boys. Stacy Keach is Frank James--again, why was he never a bigger star?--and the Stacy-David interactions are quite good, as Walter is pushing the theory that the gang broke up due to Frank's loyalty to his crazy brother, and Cole's loyalty to his useless, none-too-swift brothers. Oh, and I loved that Hill made sure to acknowledge the fact that the Civil War was still a gaping wound at the time of the James and the Youngers--everyone's still either a rebel or a damn yankee, and it's another piece of the motivations of everyone involved. It's a well thought out film and there's good performances--there's worse things you could spend your time on.

[1980] THE SWORD: Really fantastic swordplay movie from Patrick Tam (his first.) It's all about the cost of ambition, as symbolized by the Chi Mud--a sword made by evil men, and Swordmaster Wah has been told to throw it away. But he just can't--it's never quite explained why he has the sword in the first place, but we can imagine the process of acquiring it meant something to him. He gives it to a friend for safekeeping (girlfriend? concubine? I have no idea what the culturally specific relationship is) and goes into seclusion. He is the best swordsman in the land, after all, and everybody wants to fight the best. But the sword becomes his downfall and that of many others. I mean, the Chi Mud doesn't like possess people or something, there's little of the supernatural in this film. It's a symbol, like I said, of Wah's ambition (that he's still holding onto, even in retirement) and the guy who just wants one fight with Wah, Li (Adam Cheng.) And Wah's daughter is running around the film, causing trouble or looking for vengeance, and a pretty one-dimensional villain (in the sense that he never reflects upon why he wants what he wants--he's your usual nakedly power-hungry antagonist) manipulating things in the background, who's married to Li's childhood sweetheart. And of course he's a crappy husband. So you have all these interwoven character dynamics and the film just winds them up and then presses go and we speed to the bittersweet conclusion. Suffice it to say Li gets what he wants--or what he thought he had wanted--and it's all sorts of awful. Without giving away how, he has the Chi Mud in the end; his last act is pitching it over a cliff, which would be my one quibble with the film--it redeems him a little too much; better the freezeframe happen a few seconds before, him with the sword in hand, deciding whether to throw it or not. This is a really lovely film from the early days of the Hong Kong renaissance--Wikipedia says Patrick Tam was part of the "Hong Kong New Wave," which is not a term I'm that familiar with (but it includes Tsui and Ann Hui--again, according to Wikipedia) but apparently this film (and Tam) were an early part of the transforming Hong Kong cinema of the 80s and 90s. As Mark Pollard says in his review, "Patrick influenced HK cinema by pushing for higher standards and combining modern film techniques with traditional Chinese sensibilities." Even from the start, apparently (and now I understand better why it was a big deal that he came out of retirement to do a new film this year.) Great stuff, definitely check it out if you're a Hong Kong fan. I'd recommend it for everybody, but I know there are those who don't like Hong Kong tropes (wires, a bit of sentiment, swordplay in general.) This one hit me just right.

[1980] CLAN OF THE WHITE LOTUS: This time it's Gordon Liu versus Lieh Lo as a Pai Mei lookalike (Pai Mei himself gets killed in the opening credits.) That's the film! It's something like a five-round fight as the overconfident Priest White Lotus beats Liu's Hung Wei-Ting again and again, but always manages to find a way to leave him alive for the next film. And there's some training sequences--Gordon has to learn ladies' kung fu to get in striking distance of Priest White Lotus (which means his voice drops an octave while he fights) and then learn acupuncture (to find the priest's fatal point. It's a really memorable scene when he slows Priest White Lotus down enough to run through all the pressure points he can think of with the needles he hid in his hair.) Other than the fights there's a bunch of training sequences with Gordon beating on his comic relief sidekick and Kara Hui telling him to stop beating on his comic relief sidekick before he kills him. When she's not teaching him about feminine kung fu. She somehow manages to really stand out despite not having a huge role--she's basically Gordon Liu's coach. It's decent stuff--a couple of the later fight scenes are really memorable, as is the initial fight where Gordon loses his brother and his girlfriend to those no good Chings.

[1980] RETURN TO THE 36TH CHAMBER: Not that it has anything to do with the original 36th Chamber movie--but "Scaffolding Kung Fu" probably sounded unsexy. Gordon Liu starts off as a conman in this, and he's roped into helping the workers at a local garment factory by playing a Shaolin master and intimidating the factory's owner into raising their wages (those no good Manchurians have taken over, you see, and are forcing a pay cut.) Of course he's exposed as a fraud--so he goes off to learn actual kung fu! Of course, being a shady character he has to con his way into the monastery too, and he's caught, and as punishment has to build scaffolding around the entire temple. This is the film's vast training sequence--he's not allowed into the temple proper but the process of scaffolding (and watching the other students) teaches him kung fu while he works. And then he's ready to return and campaign for labor reform using the martial arts style of negotiation (shaolin scaffolding style, where your only weapon is the bamboo string you're using to lash your enemies to their own weapons and whatever's handy.) Oddly PG--the bodycount is 0. Nice, well-made fun, and it is amusing in parts (though they do play that "here comes the nutty part!" music a bit too much.) The Foreign Humor was the comic relief guy who wore huge buck teeth the whole movie--I didn't understand that.

[1980] SHAAN: OK--I'm trying to mix in a little Bollywood with my 80s watching. (This is why I'm excited for this project. Not just this, but for trying some new films in general. God help me--I actually plan to watch all three hours and 30 minutes of Heaven's Gate.) I figure, it's the biggest cinema in the world, it can't all be bad three hour musical costume epics. But it's hard to know where to start--there's never been as many Bollywood fanboys as there has been Hong Kong deviants or Japanaphiles, so there's not a lot of information out there that I can find. And yet on the IMDB like every Indian film has at least 7 stars out of 10, so I can't really go by that either. (Apparently Indian audiences just love everything.) This movie--Shaan--was directed by Ramesh Sippy, who did Sholay in the 70s, which is like THE Bollywood movie--so I figured it was a good place to start. Where Sholay was a Leone pastiche this is more of a Bond pastiche--well, if Bond was a city policeman with two brothers and Blofeld just ran guns for a living and was just sort of sneeringly evil but not out to rule the world. But he still has his secret lair! With a crocodile pit and henchmen and a clean white suit and a control chair with a million buttons. The policeman gets killed about a third of the way in so his ne'er do well brothers (the very big star Amitabh Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor) decide to clean up their act and take revenge through a variety of shenanigans and musical numbers. Amitabh fights a crocodile in the closing reel. I liked the beginning way more than anything else--Bachchan and Kapoor are low-level conmen who get conned by an uncle-niece conmen team, and then the four of them get conned by yet another conwoman (Parveen Babi), and there's shifting alliances and cute humor and establishment of how slick everybody is (and we have our love interests and comic relief for the rest of the film.) But after their brother is killed by the Blofeld doppleganger this becomes fairly standard stuff. The effects are decent but even regular Bond movies look dated now in that regard. Yeah. It was good, but not different or distinct enough as an entertainment to get me too enchanted.

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING: The only person on the planet with my name. Wait--I don't exist either!

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 0 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Oh well. Yes--a brief respite from recycled movie blogging to another form of the lazy blogger's content: the Internet poll. Via Crooked Timber.

[1980] ORDINARY PEOPLE: If you've seen one tale of suburban emotional repression, you've seen them all, right? Course not! Not every messed-up Brady Bunch has Tim Hutton on their side, giving a remarkable performance as a teenager recovering from a suicide attempt and the guilt of losing his brother. Very few have Donald Sutherland as the suburban dad: seemingly the only levelheaded one, but the levelheadedness only masks an inability to help anyone in his family. And I'm betting none have Mary Tyler Moore as their villainous boogeymoms, permanently unable to forgive Tim Hutton's Conrad for bringing shame upon their household with his suicide attempts and his inability to be her favored dead son. Plus Judd Hirsh is there too as a wise oracle of helpful psychobabble. All the greatness of the film is due to this ensemble. I mean, great acting or not, this film's message is just the usual "forgive yourself before you can forgive others" kind of thing. It's just more convincing when you have Hutton dropping f-bombs on the guy from Taxi. Plus Moore's character never quite figures that out, leading to the film's bittersweet conclusion. Nicely done by Robert Redford, and I can completely see why this beat Raging Bull: it's strongly conventional, a real honest-to-gosh Hollywood dramatic movie with actors acting and strongly emoting (or strongly not emoting in Moore's case; she's perky, but cold somehow)--something Oscar tends to reward. (The director's Oscar probably was a travesty, though, as Redford is merely competent in this, or anything else he's done.)

[1980] THE LAST METRO: Nice, quiet film about a theater company making its way through Paris during the occupation. Catherine Deneuve's husband is Jewish and has to live in the basement of their theater, leaving her in charge of everything above ground--she runs the company and stars in the plays. Gerard Depardieu is there too as a new actor in the company and a love interest for the beleaguered Deneuve's Mme. Steiner. He's good, more restrained and less sloppy than a lot of the stuff I've seen him in. But the picture is basically Deneuve's and she's great as this person burdened with a huge set of responsibilities, in the midst of a war, who never gets too desperate or down on herself, but it's mostly because she doesn't allow herself the luxury of an emotional life. Her legendary coolness becomes sympathetic, in other words. Definitely not a waste of time, but it's not going to bowl you over either (not that everything has to.)

[1980] SOMEWHERE IN TIME: Yeah--if you couldn't forgive Il Mare or even Kate & Leopold their inconsistencies or their unabashed sentiment this is not the movie for you. If you don't like the twist ending style of science fiction (this is written by Richard Matheson) this is also not the movie for you. But if you can be swayed by atmosphere, and by earnest performances, and the creation of a simple yet perfectly constructed self-enclosed world--this is the movie for you. Like Bad Timing (this would be a fabulous double feature with that) it's the tale of a doomed romance. But it's science fiction! Where ideas become literal, physical things. So the characters do not conspire against themselves--the universe conspires against them. It's very much of the type of interesting "idea" science fiction (as opposed to, you know, stuff with flying saucers) you occasionally find in Analog or F&SF, or at least I did when I read those kind of things. The director is a journeyman type who did Jaws 2 and is in tv now--Jeannot Szwarc--but the choices he made were all the right ones. Mainly the decision to be restrained--I think he moves the camera at the same speed throughout the film, except for the one time he doesn't--and that's during the twist ending! When you would say "oh, crap" to yourself at the end of the Matheson or the Bradbury or whoever. And he creates mood with the repetition of the Rachmaninoff Rhapsody, and it's a great pick--a popular piece of classical for this classic of the popular cinema. (The interior of the hotel is blood red, just like that scene in The Shining--explain that, cinephiles!) One of those commerical movies where everything just came together right--and like Blade Runner, another film in that category, a classic of mood, but with an unambiguous plot. It's also a classic of science fiction; the heartbreak of Reeve and Seymour (and they're both perfect, though Reeve goes a little too Clark Kent at times) is impossible without the time travel. I don't know if it'll hold up to repeat viewings, though--always the problem with "twist ending" SF. But recommended for the science fiction heads and anyone who can swim in an ocean of sentiment.

[1980] SHOGUN ASSASSIN: 160 minutes of stylized violence edited down to 80 minutes gives you....80 minutes of stylized violence. Really, the Baby Cart movies don't lose much in translation because they never had much to begin with, so if you just want a best-of comp of the first two films than this is perfectly fine. It gives you the swordplay without the superfluous plot--plus you get to here Sandra Bernhard voice the Supreme Ninja with a terrible Japanese accent! I think I don't get too much out of them (or this) for the same reason I don't get into Bond movies: I never have the sense that our (anti-)hero is in any danger. He's indestructable, the baby's indestructable, so let's go slaughter some ninjas! And they do. If these movies were more fun that would make up for them being not very good--but they go down the path of being incredibly grim instead. PASS. (Note that this is technically a Kill Bill movie, but Tarantino doesn't actually homage it--it's the movie the Bride watches with her daughter as they fall asleep. So it's basically Baby's First Sleaze & Exploitation film within the Kill Bill universe, which it sort of is in ours too--something to get you into Asian pulp cinema but also something you throw away when you throw away the childish things.)

[1980] THE STUNT MAN: I rewatched this to see if I could justify the impossibly high ranking I was going to give it--and I almost can. There's a stretch near the end where Peter O'Toole is no longer on the screen and we're bogging down in the Railsback/Hershey romance and you can sort of feel the energy leaking out of the picture. But the first 90 minutes or so and the ending are pure gold. It's a metamovie that's amazingly uncynical--unlike most metamovies where the directors sort of rub it in your face that YES MOVIES MANIPULATE YOU YOU DUMB RUBE, Rush takes that as a feature, not a bug. It's like the central condition of the universe of The Stunt Man; nobody's ever who they say they are, except when they are. Hershey isn't in love with Railsback, except when she is. O'Toole's a manipulating monster (almost always ensconced in a machine; he's like a supervillain in that crane-propelled director's chair) except when he isn't. Even the clearly everymannish Railsback starts to doubt his own simplicity, screaming out "I'm real!" to O'Toole's Eli near the end. It's so playful and energetic, admitting artifice while the same time reveling in it (unlike Cruising, or your usual De Palma, where manipulation is trotted out as something that always leans sinister.) The proverbial million billion stars.

[1980] BAD TIMING: What a beautifully fractured narrative. (WHAT HUH I THOUGHT TARANTINO INVENTED THE FRACTURED NARRATIVE) I've never seen somebody carry a movie quite like Theresa Russell carried this thing--it's one of the braver performances I can think of. No qualms about nudity, or looking like an idiot, or going over the top in a rage the one minute and playing a near-corpse the next. She actually turns into the Joker at one point (and if you've seen the move you know what I mean.) She's paired with the very limited Art Garfunkel, but his casting makes sense--a limited actor to play a guy with a limited emotional range. (It also probably makes her performance look more brilliant as a result.) And there's Harvey Keitel running around in the background with a terrrible Euroaccent, but it's okay, he does well despite that. It's a fine fine tale told sideways about two terrifically maladjusted people--she the irrepressible flirt, he the brooding paranoiac--who can't let go of each other. Recommended for everyone, but especially for first dates. (The Criterion cover art is really terrible, by the way--it looks like The Last Seduction poster, and this isn't a noir in the least. Well, a guy falls in love with the wrong woman, but aside from that it isn't.)

[1980] THE FORMULA: WOW this was a lot of nothing. So apparently you can get your 70s TV movie with your 70s TV script and your flat-as-a-pancake direction made into a feature if you have George C. Scott star and bring in Brando to chew the scenery three times. (Twice they're there together.) When it's not boring it's preachy--something about oil and corporations and amorality in big business. There's like one interesting scene where Scott and his companion go to this "pornographic club" in Germany where ladies dressed like the Rockettes dance in front of footage of Hitler. "Interesting" in the sense that it's the only time this movie does something not bland. (Besides the performances, I mean--Scott is always good and Brando is his usual mumbly hambone self.) Oh, and there's elephants running loose in the midst of a battle during a World War II flashback. A litle bit of goofiness that happens five minutes in and you can stop watching at that point. Stinky poo.

[1980] CRUISING: Yeah--when your movie begins with the disclaimer "The film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world. It is set in one small segment of that world which is not meant to be representative of the whole"--you know you're in for a movie. I had no idea this movie was as controversial back in the day--this review says it is thought of as the Birth of the Nation for gay people. It's nowhere near that bad--the two most morally ambigous figures in the film are the "killer" (Friedkin makes it as ambiguous as possible as to who the killer actually was) and Pacino's character--an undercover cop operating in the world of gay clubs in order to root out a serial killer. A really shallow, politically motivated reading of the film would have you believing that Pacino is walking the line between heterosexuality (the good side) and homosexuality (bad, depraved, men in leather) but that's not really what's up there on the screen. I mean, from the beginning his relationship with his girlfriend (Karen Allen) is completely perfunctory--she's like a badge of his presumed hetero-ness and nothing more. And the killer (or killers) is never given a reason for their actions--just the Pee Wee Hermanesque line "You made me do that." There's some mucky flashback thrown in to sort of hint at a motivation of the killer--some obsessive nonsense about his father--but it's so incoherent it has to be intentional. Oh, and your climatic showdown is between two guys with knives in their boots and no pants on. Yeah. This is completely worth your while if you can get your hands on it (just don't ask me for a copy--I can't tell you how frustrating it is to watch a movie for the first time on CED. You know how dusty old records tend to skip? Same thing times ten with CEDs. I'd have to burn it ten times before I got a clean copy.) Oh, and here's somebody's, like, Master's thesis about the film. Warning: the phrase "Lacanian psychoanalysis" is used.

[1980] RETURN OF THE SECAUCUS SEVEN: Well. This was certainly a nice enough portrait of aging boomer-types circa 1980. But I can't help thinking time has past it by, and it exists today more like an essay (or a short story) about the end of the 60s and such. It's just (and I know this is a criticism of Sayles in general) not particularly filmic. I dunno. Is Clerks going to feel like this in 20 years? Where the comedy appears so dated that you can no longer forgive the bad performances? Well, maybe. Anyway--yeah. Consider me underwhelmed.

[1980] SPOOKY ENCOUNTERS: Raimi must have seen this before Evil Dead II. It's not quite on that level, but I can't imagine some of the gags in that film without this one. Like--there's a scene where a corpse is mirroring Sammo's every move, so Sammo gets smart and pretends to smash a brick into his head. So the corpse smashes the brick into Sammo's head. HA! It's the kind of random slapstick Raimi loves to pepper in, and it's good to see him stealing from one of the best. It's inventive and energetic, like you expect a Hong Kong movie of this era to be, but funny too. I liked a quite a bit, but it's not something I could use a lot of analytical verbiage explaining why I liked it. It's not completely coherent as a narrative--but it doesn't aspire to anything like a coherent narrative. It's a collection of escalating setpieces, and just about every one is memorable. Corpses in jars attack rips chunks out of Sammo during the opening credits. A skeleton hand grabs his ass! A ghost appears in a mirror and pulls a guy into the netherworld. There's a hopping vampire (and this is one of the first hopping vampire movies) that Sammo has to duel in two claustrophobic scenes. And the aforementioned slapstick. And the showdown between two kung fu mystics fighting on giant raised altars where Sammo gets possessed by the monkey god. And he speaks in monkey gibberish and I have no idea if they subtitled the gibberish in the original Cantonese (or Mandarin?) but they subtitle the gibberish in the version I watched and it's hilarious. I dunno, just watch it--I loved it.

[1980] VIRUS: So I figured, Fukasaku, Edward James Olmos, George Kennedy--how bad could it be? And isn't bad at all. Sure, it's bloated (amazingly Netflix has the full version--and I can't imagine what they hacked out to make the American version that gave it such a bad reputation) and there're too many scenes of George Kennedy chairing a survivors' conference, and a couple of the English-speaking performances are terrible--but it's unflinching in a way you expect from Fukasaku. There's a scene where a bunch of guys are listening to a five year old decide to kill himself that's just harrowing (excepting that whoever they hired to voice the five-year-old was obviously not five.) And another where this dying woman is piloting a boat out into nowhere and urging her dying child passenger to yell the name of his father, just to keep his spirits up. Those (among others) are what I think of as the Fukasaku moments, the ones by the guy who grew up during and after the war in Japan. And did I tell you about the character actors who keep popping up? Glenn Ford! Robert Vaughn! Bo Svenson! Henry frigging Silva! Chuck Connors with a terrible British accent! It's worth seeing just for that cast. So yeah--perfectly competent disaster film with some nice moments and the bleakest happy ending possible.

[1980] THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY: This was treeeeemendous, right from the quasi-Tangerine Dream score during the opening credits. Well, actually I was wavering on it for a stretch during the opening half, thinking "this is just a well-plotted caper film" but once things started spiralling out of control it totally sucked me in. Bob Hoskins--I mean, I knew what he was capable of from Unleashed (my second Hoskins picture after Roger Rabbit) but this is a much calmer (and better) performance. You could find bad things to say about this film's take on the Irish--they're sort of the unstoppable amoral Other--or Americans--the mafia guys in this movie have the same role Europeans play in American movies, cruel, cool and calculating supermen--but it wouldn't be worth it. But note how as soon as the Irish boss is killed (who's also a demolition derby driver--so he's quite at home with chaos) there's a literal explosion. That's what this movie is about, a tide of chaos that gradually drowns petty crimelord Bob Hoskins. And Hoskins is amazing. Fabulous stuff, though it's more the result of the script and the performances and not the very inoffensive direction.

[1980] KAGEMUSHA: Lucas should've offered to edit too when he was offering Kurosawa Star Wars bucks to finish this thing, because I think it went on a bit too long. I dunno--I haven't seen that much Kurosawa, but I had the distinct impression he was trying to do a Leone movie here. It's probably just the combination of the huge running time and the trumpet fanfares on the soundtrack that gave me that sense. (Well--that and the dream sequence, which seemed like the musings of the railroad baron in Once Upon A Time In The West when he was staring into picture of the ocean. Except Leone did that in a couple of lingering closeups and some ocean noise on the soundtrack; Kurosawa had to break open the whole box of crayons.) Yeah, there's color, and pageantry, and young men being sacrificed on the altar of color and pageantry, and a wandering thief who ends up being the only one who believes in all the color and pageantry. I just--I feel like I've seen this rags-to riches-to rags story done better (as recently as Melvin & Howard!) As long as Kagemusha himself was front and center this film was golden, but the frequent and lengthy interludes in enemy camps and internal politics is taking this down a notch for me.

The guy who played Shingen's brother was great too. The guys doing peasant-stock comic relief were fun too (one of the many stylistic quirks Lucas stole from Kurosawa.) Hey--I didn't hate it, but I'm not praising it to the moon either.

[1980] MELVIN & HOWARD: Awwwww--this was really great. A feel-good movie where you don't feel manipulated into feeling good. Demme and Goldman really loved their characters, so they never get to the point where Melvin is just a lovable loser, or Mary Steenburgen is just a flake--they both get their moments to shine, or to be obnoxious, or stupid, and make bad decisions all on their own. There's times when I was afraid Paul Le Mat's acting was going to descend into "awww shucks" good-boyism, but he always pulls back. He's restrained and he plays it basically straight--Melvin gets the joke about himself but he also can't not be who he is (if that makes any sense.) The movie is restrained in a similar fashion. I really liked it.

[1980] HOPSCOTCH: This was a perfectly fine little movie--it's like the funniest possible flipside of something unbearably grim like The Jackal. A little overcute for my tastes. I know it was sort of different to do a cold war comedy in 1980, but I think it's lost a bit since we're not in that context anymore. Doing this with Matthau was great as well (though the intentionally bad accent schtick wears a little thin.) The first hour or so is really funny, especially the Matthau-Glenda Jackson banter--it's the second half, full of clever plan as it is, that loses me.

BLOGGING THE FILMS OF THE 80S: You know--instead of letting this place go dark for months and months again, I'm just going to recycle my DVDVR posts for the Best of the 80s thing we're doing over there. That way, if you stumble across this place from some long-dead blog somewhere, or a random search or something (god knows "Slotman" is a popular name), you won't think I or the blog are dead. Plus this way everything will be in one place when I make up my best of the 80s list. They'll be short little film reviews for the most part--I don't have the time to go too far in depth--and this'll last as long as I can maintain my enthusiasm for this little project. The tags in front indicate the year of the film (we're starting right in the beginning.) Enjoy.

A POST ABOUT NOT POSTING: Yeah--been a bit busy. I've got this to take care of, and it ain't no joke. Also:
You can find me writing at Veteran Presence now.
I am going to involve myself in the DVDVR 80s project (a best of the movies of the 80s poll.)

Also: I turn up in Jim's BSG threads, and occasionally at John Cole's and (very occasionally) at ObWi.

Oh, and did you see this Ezra Klein thread about Hitch's bout with insanity? The best joke comes four comments in, from "calling all toasters":

Hitchens foresaw "a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate."

That would be all the distilleries in the world beating the crap out of Mother Teresa.

Heehee. Anyhoo--there's your current status report. Carry on.

I THINK HINDERAKER WAS RECEIVING PREMONITIONS OF THE DEATH OF THE INTERNETS: And not the actual meatspace Apocalypse, because (and I know it's a few days after August 22) we finally have the blog post dumb enough to cause the Internet to cave in on itself. Via John Cole (who now has his own HOCB-like fan site.)

"THE PHYSICS OF THIS.....MAKE NO SENSE"*: It would be difficult for MacGyver to blow up a plane with carry-on items, never mind a collection of halfwits. Via Swopa.


*One of Crow T. Robot's better lines from Escape 2000.

WAR STORIES: Lebanese army offers tea to Israeli "invaders."

At one point in the video, Daoud and an Israeli soldier have the following exchange, as translated by CNN's Octavia Nasr:

Daoud: "Don't we need to tell our bosses?"

Israeli soldier: "Tell whoever you want."

Daoud: "We need to brief them on what happened."

Israeli soldier: "We briefed (U.S. President) Bush. You brief whoever you want."

Daoud: "We need to brief Bush too."

THE STRANGE CHARM OF TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE: Is there a more inexplicable actual good movie than this? It's not a great film. It would be deeply silly to consider it a great film. But three out of four stars? 7 out of 10 on the IMDB scale? Yeah, that's about right. It's energetic. It's hyperviolent. There's graphic robot death. The voice cast is superb. Orson Welles' presence lends it a weird credibility. It's definitely not--not, not, a thousand times not--a flawed masterpiece like many of Welles' films ended up being. But does it deserve its place in the cult film pantheon? Oh yes.

My theory is that this film is the grafting of Heavy Metal onto an 80s children's cartoon. Unlike the other megapopular Hasbro property of the 80s, G.I. Joe, Transformers had a mostly robot cast. And as is true with Saturday morning cartoons to this day, you can kill all the robots you wants and rating boards won't care. Heavy Metal was still state-of-the-art (North) American animation back in '86 (or so my theory goes.) Or, its aesthetic was, bleak and bloody and vaguely realistic. American animators were no longer trying to be Disney, and it was still pre-Akira, so they weren't trying to be Japanese--it was the Heavy Metal interregnum.

So you have this dark aesthetic. You have a cast full of robots that you know you can get away with killing. So you--you being the Sunbow braintrust who came up with this thing, in whose mouths I am putting words--say to yourself, "Hey--let's have Starscream blasted into ash! Let's melt down robots in a acid pit while they scream in pain! Let's kill off a whole planet populated by robots--and we'll show some robot children about to be sucked away just to drive the point home! It's ok--they're robots!" It's dark science fantasy as applied to a children's cartoon. It's bold what they did, and I'm amazed Hasbro agreed to it (and think it more likely they didn't know what was going on.) And I think it's why it's sustained itself for so long as a memorable film, but it's also why it died at the box office--kids are not amused by robots being fed to robot sharks, nor parents by having to explain why Optimus Prime had to die (a complete different kind of explanation than--say--why Bambi's mom had to die, something American parents are a little more prepared for.)

Yeah. It's a cult film with an especially vocal cult, but most cult films do deserve a portion of their worship.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot the other Heavy Metal connection: the very long-haired, leather-pants-wearing soundtrack, performed by 80s bands who weren't even one-hit wonders. Not that the Heavy Metal soundtrack was like that, but it's another way Transformers is a juvenile interpretation of Heavy Metal. I mean, it even has Weird Al's Devo tribute 'Dare To Be Stupid' as a major song (Devo being one of the Heavy Metal bands.)

EDIT 2: The always reliable Wikipedia: Welles hated the film. Shortly before he died, he told his biographer, Barbara Leaming, that he had spent the day "playing a toy" in a movie about toys who "do horrible things to each other." He could not remember the name of the film and referred to it as a movie about a line of toys from Japan. Toys doing horrible things to other toys! Welles got it.

"SOMEONE WHO WAS BORN ON THIRD BASE AND THINKS HE HIT A TRIPLE": The Frog's briandtw on Bill Simmons and his World Series of Poker column. And yet--I can still not get completely on board with the Simmons hatred that is more or less Internet conventional wisdom at this point. The man still does a better (or at least, more entertaining) team-by-team NBA preview than anyone else I can think of. Of course, being one of the twelve or so NBA fans left, my priorities are not in the mainstream.

FOR GOD'S SAKE, JOURNAMALISTS: Is it that hard to track down the JonBenet murderer's ex-wife and confirm that 1. she really is his ex-wife and 2. she's really claiming he was with her, and five states away, during the Christmas of 1996? All I've seen are reports documenting one appearance on one TV station. Followup, please.

THE LAST TIME I WENT TO DUNKIN DONUTS: Was the first time the people there knew me well enough to have my coffee ready for me exactly like I like it (extra large, cream, two Splendas) before I walked in the door (since they can see me pull up.)

And now I haven't been there in like six weeks. Stupid sudden bout with cheapness.

IN MEMORIAM OF WENDELL VAUGHN, 2006 EDITION: Yes--Quasar died for the twenty-first time in the last issue of Annihilation: Nova. He went out like a punk, as usual, since the quantum bands are only the most powerful objects in the Marvel Universe when Mark Gruenwald is writing them. But: in this Dave's Longbox thread devoted to Infinity Gauntlet #4 (which contained another of Quasar's deaths) Tim O'Neil links to his own appreciation of Gruenwald's Quasar, which is worth reading if you're a Quasar doubter (I understand from Dave's thread that there are many) and essential reading if you're a Gruenwald fan. Tim picks up on something I've been thinking of lately: Wendell Vaughn is Marvel's version of Morrison's Animal Man:

Some of the most memorable moments from Quasar were moments like those, dedicated basically to exploring the unenlightened corners of the Marvel Universe, and exploring the very nature of fictional universes. How are fictional characters created Â? and at what point do characters take on a life of their own? Shades of Animal Man! How do Gods Â? or at least near-Gods Â? die? Who mourns the passing of cosmic beings? How about the birth and creation of cosmic deities? How are comic book universes structured Â? what separates mere alternate realities from entirely separate multiverses, like the Marvel Universe and the New Universe? Some of these questions might seem a bit wonkish, but GruenwaldÂ?s enthusiasm for these cosmic questions was truly contagious. As preposterous as it sounds, he believed every bit of it, he believed that it mattered, on some level, and that by answering one deep question of comic book lore he only asked a dozen more.

Kind of Morrisonian concerns, you know? This of course means Gruenwald wrote the Marvel versions of Watchmen AND Animal Man--probably an irreproducible creative feat.

NON-WHITE PEOPLE IN THE QUARTERBACK POSITION: Something HarpoGarza mentioned in this DVDVR thread: Did last night's Hall of Fame Game set the record for minority people playing quarterback? Donovan McNabb, Aaron Brooks, Marques Tuiasosopo, and Timmy Chang--four people who don't resemble Johnny Unitas at all. As Harpo said, interesting. I don't know what it means, but it's interesting.

(Timmy didn't look super great last night, either, and I can't imagine Andy Reid cutting Detmer--who has been there a million years--in favor of Chang. Just go to the CFL already, Timmy! It's the WAC with 12 men on a side!)

BLACKER SMOKE MEANS....MEANS.....THE LEFT IS TERRAISTS!: If you wanted an explainer about the Reuters doctored photos thing, here is Brad R.

Also: Gavin M. and Eric Muller uncover additional--and systemic--photo-doctoring by The Left.

I LOVE BEING REMINDED OF THIS STORY: NBA still paying television revenue to the Silna brothers, former owners of the ABA's Spirits of St Louis. Via the Frog.

A WIZARDWORLD PHOTO: Here. The best part is Doom's "oh my!" pose.

PEOPLE WHO ALWAYS HAVE TO PULL IN BACKWARDS INTO A PARKING SPACE, NO MATTER WHERE OR WHEN: Are the worst people in the world.

NERD MARDI GRAS: The Flickr San Diego Comic-Con group.

YOUR COMICS-RELATED BLOG POST THAT MADE ME LAUGH OUT LOUD OF THE DAY: Dave Intermittent (from almost two months ago) on DC's The Great Ten: "I mean, c'mon: the Mother of Champions, who can, and I quote, "birth a litter" of superhumans every couple of hours? Why not just call her the Yellow Horde and be done with it. And no less than four characters who look like folks with homes on Zu, the Magic Mountain? This is like having an JLA made up of three cowboys, Scarface, and two rappers (which was, the lineup of JLA Detroit, of course)." Hehehehehee.

(And yes, Morrison's involved with The Great Ten, so there's a very good chance he's playing with our expectations of what Chinese superheroes should be like, or commenting on the one-child policy, or blah blah blah blah, but he may have gotten too clever for his own good with Mother of Champions.)

BRINGING NEW MEANING TO THE TERM "GROPENFUHRER": Majikthise on Bush & Merkel.

WHEN YOU'VE LOST BELGRAVIA DISPATCH, ETC.: Remind me to never fool Gregory Djerejian into thinking my weird eternal war-loving political movement was not complete insane. The blowback is brutal.

THAT'S OUR BUSH: Note that--in addition to blaming the Syrians for the Hezbollah incursions and totally no-selling Tony Blair--his mouth was full of food the entire time. It was like Bruce Campbell playing the ugly American in the "first you want to kill me then, then you want to kiss me--blow" banquet scene in Army of Darkness, except you know Bush isn't pretending to be loathsome. I'm surprised he didn't spit some seeds out or something.

Note: Is "shit" no longer a profanity? Both NPR and CNN ran the clip without beeping.

JUVENTUS RELEGATED: I was worried they'd get off easy--in the sense of not being dropped to Serie C--but what they did receive was about as bad: Serie B with a huge 30 point penalty, which isn't much different from going to Serie C, since there's probably no way they can make it back to A for at least two years. Plus they've been stripped of their last two titles. And that's with bending the rules in consideration of Juventus' popularity; as this article points out, when Genoa was found guilty of fixing one match, they were busted down to C from A. Juventus was found guilty of fixing two whole seasons, and they're only going down to B. But like I said, with the penalty, it sort of evens out, though it seems like if the letter of the law was followed they'd be getting the soccer club death penalty. That article helpfully explains that if Juventus was made non-viable the Italian game itself would suffer, like (I guess) what the Yankees suddenly ceasing to exist would mean for baseball. (Have you ever noticed that the NFL is a strong enough product to exist without any one of it's member franchises? I think that's true.)

Berlusconi's AC Milan remain in A but are kicked out of Champions League/UEFA Cup. Fiorentina and Lazio go to B with smaller penalties. They've all vowed to appeal, so there's still a chance for altered sentences, but as of right now the Italian prosecutors have not allowed the World Cup victory to influence them. This is a good thing.

WELL, POOP: A quote found on the blog of Drum:

And yet another from Gregory Petsko: "Almost without exception, the talented women I have known have believed they had less ability than they actually had. And almost without exception, the talented men I have known believed they had more."

From an actually freely accessible WSJ piece. So if I'm a male who thinks I'm untalented, I'm probably right? Maybe I can go to overconfidence classes.

.....though, thinking about it, Petsko was talking about science talent, as there's plenty of writers and artists out there who thought their stuff was crap when it wasn't. Good thing I've picked bioinformatics as a career! Oh, wait....

SUMMING UP L'AFFAIRE D'FRISCH: In its current form as of the evening of 7.12.06, before it degenerates into something even more idiotic, like Greenwald vs Patterico: Ann Althouse:

I agree Frisch has a big problem. She's the weakling who entered a drinking match with a man who can drink you under the table. She lost control. She paid the price -- a big one. Goldstein's you-talked-about-my-child move is a strong one, but it's a move nonetheless, made by a person who likes to play the game... hard. He's not a victim. He's one of the people who has advanced himself in the blogosphere by making it hostile and ugly. Like all of us, he is capable of being hurt by a genuine crazy. But why not just delete the trolls? Why rile them?Some of them really aren't playing with a full deck. Why push weak people until they lose control? It's an ugly game, and I think Jeff knows he plays it.

Via (I think) one of the interminable Sadly, No! threads on the subject. Feel my shame, oh Internets, for having followed this whole episode.

AWWWW: Japanese spammers have appropriated Diana's old digs. This is her least auspicious retirement.

AH, ZIDANE: Goes from "too old to play well" at the beginning of the World Cup, then to "resurgent old fella" up until the moment he became "inexplicable headbutt guy" with ten minutes to go in the second overtime. I love the World Cup, and '06 will be remembered not for Italy winning on one missed French penalty kick but for the headbutt heard 'round the world.

YOUR INCONGRUOUS BIT OF TELEVISION PROGRAMMING OF THE DAY: The Road Warrior on the History Channel. I had no idea it was a documentary about 1980s Australia.

THE TOP TEN THINGS THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION HAS IN COMMON WITH CAPITAL-F FASCISM: Lindsay Beyerstein estimates how close we are to arriving at our own private Abyssinia.

CUBES GOT FINED $100,000: For this!?

YET ANOTHER WAY TO CHEAPLY CATEGORIZE THE HUMAN RACE: Or at least the male gender. It's a movie thing. I was listening to sports radio on the way in today and they were talking about The Godfather for the the billionth time and I got to thinking, "Hey--Bill Simmons talks about The Godfather all the time." Funny thing is Simmons never talks about Star Wars. Well, not funny but interesting--a possible way to divvy up the male gender into types. So here it is: you're either a Star Wars male or a Godfather male. You'll rarely find a male subgroup that knows both movies by heart and works references from both into their daily conversation. That's the not-even-slightly substantiated theory I've posted on the Internet, anyway.

THE PATRIARCHY EXPLAINED AS A NATURAL CONSEQUENCE OF SEXUAL DIMORPHISM: Or another of Razib's greatest hits.

I'm three-quarters done with the Judith Rich Harris book that inspired Razib's post, by the way, and it's really great. She's an independant scholar, so she isn't tied down to one field and thus goes all over the scientific map to reason out her view of why people are different. Good good stuff, and paced and organized really well so there's some strong narrative drive to it.

THE MOST ANTICLIMACTIC FINAL FOUR EVER: Logically, if through the round of eight this was the greatest NCAA tournament ever--and many people thought it was--than this Final Four and Championship were quite the letdown. And they were. Three stinkers of athletic contests. No Gonzaga to root for. No George Mason to be an amazing story and make this must-see television. No, just two BCS programs fluking their way into the title game, and one just totally laying down in the championship. (Regarding the fluking, Billy Donovan admitted as much when he said after the Georgetown game that if they reran this tournament they'd get four different teams.) And a long-haired guy named Joe Kim. BAH.

"COLLEGE FOOTBALL DOESN'T NEED A GEORGE MASON": I love how every comment on this article (inexplicably near the top of Google news searches for "George Mason") is telling the author he's full of it.

A PLEA TO BURGER KING: Hey! Listen--I generally like your product. I like the chances you take in your advertising campaign--I'm sure you understand how disturbing the guy in the "King" suit is, but you're running with it anyway, doing a promotion about a thousand times better than those milquetoast McDonald's ads. ("I'm loving it!"? Yeah, how much did they pay someone to think that one up?) But please--if you're going to have the Veggie Whopper available as a standard button to press on all your registers, please tell your new hires that it exists. I know you don't want it on the menu, for whatever reason. I know you don't advertise it. Maybe you have too much invested in the horrid BK Veggie, and you don't want to admit failure right yet. Whatever your reasons are, I understand them. Just tell your own people that you 1. sell this sandwich, 2. that it's cheaper than a Whopper (I've had people try to charge me full Whopper price for the Veggie), and 3. that it's definitely not the BK Veggie. Thank you.

SAY: When did The Nation add a sports columnist? I liked Dave Zirin's Olympics column and I like his WBC column. He comes off like a sports fan with a political consciousness who happens to lean left, and not the Marxist "sports are the opiate of the masses" type you could imagine the Nation hiring. Good stuff.

THE PLAY-IN GAME: I may or may not say this every year, but I always think it: the play-in game should be for two bubble teams, not for two conference champions. Conference champion should always equal field of 64, and we should be watching Air Force play George Mason (or in a just world, Cincinnati and Hofstra) to get in and not poor Hampton and Monmouth.

BSG: DOWNLOADED: I already said most of what I wanted to say at Jim's place--but the opening of this episode is so amazing. First the rebirth of Caprica Six, who we haven't seen since the miniseries, the sudden Baltar appearance (teasing the "Baltar's a Cylon!" possibility) which is quickly proven to be a Baltar hallucination. Me, I think both hallucinations are just internal dialogues in C. Six and Baltar's heads, nothing more, which after listening to the podcast is also what I think Ron Moore thinks. But he can always change his mind about that.

And then the rebirth of Galactica Boomer! The one who was the most intriguing part of the first season. The one who blew up the water tanks and then found water and loved the Chief and got him to hate her and tried to kill herself and then Adama and basically had Cylonhood thrust upon her. Knowing all that about G. Boomer makes the look of horror on her face when she sees another Eight--and realizes that yes, she is, in fact, a Cylon, born from a machine, and every moment of her life on Galactica was a lie--that much richer.

IRONY: Yes, irony. I think. If American Idol keeps beating figure skating in the ratings, it will mean Americans have turned away from something that started as a pseudocompetition and gradually evolved into an actual sport and switched to a blatantly subjective talent show. America: Keepin' It Fake Since Sonja Henje!